Curating Means Involving Artists

Quotation

What is most important to you when curating?

Many institutions book different artists based on aesthetic that are biases that are shaped by the soundworlds already overrepresented in the public space. To me, it is important to involve a diverse mix of artists that reflect the space they emerge in, and more importantly create added value from their experience of being represented as part of a festival. Also, the networking aspect is often overlooked. A curator should facilitate sustainable and safe space for a dialogue.

What are the biggest conflicts / pleasures you encounter when curating?

Rather than conflicts I see issue that are based on my own aesthetic bias and what I think is relevant and genuinely innovative in terms of a musician’s sonic language and storytelling. Other aspects are the beliefs and values of certain genres that are shaped by the curator’s own network and the limited capacity to be fully immersed in certain scenes as a researcher–as–curator as opposed to musician–as–curator.

What does curating mean to you?

It has a lot to do with visibility. How do we divide public space? Who do we think is representative for a movement or specific scene? To me, it became crucial that scenes are far more scattered than I thought and that it is impossible to represent a movement based on sampled works or musical pieces. Rather than aspiring to all–encompassing representation and a sense of completeness, curating means allowing audiences to peek through certain windows into ever–changing networks.

These quotations have been published in the Norient book Politics of Curatorship: Collective and Affective Interventions, edited by Philipp Rhensius and Monia Acciari (Norient Books 2023).

Biography

Rim Jasmin Irscheid is a postdoctoral researcher at King's College London, working on experimental music and archival interventions across Middle Eastern contemporary sound and visual arts. Combining ethnographic research and curatorial practice, her practice-based research is looking at artist-led institution building and collaborative cultural productions across Lebanon, Palestine and Germany. In 2021, she won a British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) Fieldwork Grant Award. She holds a PhD from King's College London, a Masters in Musicology from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Musicology and Psychology from the University of Heidelberg.

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Politics of Curatorship: Collective and Affective Interventions

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What happens to curatorial practices when treated as multi-voiced, pluralistic, and process-based? The 32 contributors from all over the world, ask what curatorship could be when it is freed from its elitist notions.

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Published on July 18, 2024

Last updated on July 18, 2024

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Politics of Curatorship

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What are you listening to this summer? (photo: Adam Jones/Wikimedia).

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Short Fiction

by Matilda Lin Berke

When two people fall in love, they neither know nor talk about it. They can only reach each other through sonic fiction. Read a flash fiction story as a new episode of the Sonic Worlding column.

She asked him what songs he’d listened to that summer, after she’d played him hers.

It was the summer of isolation, long before they’d met each other. The answer would have been «Over and Over». But that song meant something to someone else back then. He could only say he’d listened to the soundtrack from an obscure Czech horror film. Like everything he said, this was true, but not complete, and he said it not in hopes of directing her feelings, but concealing his own.

He tried to imagine her listening to «My Life in Art» like she listened to the song the way he listened to it, listening literally, individually to the words – Tell me about your life in art – like it laid her life out in art. He tried to imagine her listening to «Under the Bridge», living it like Anthony Kiedis under a bridge in Los Angeles, like his father in the ‘90s before they’d both been born.

Though they could have meant nothing, he imagined that the songs were songs that meant she’d been alone, that she was saying she’d been alone. Though at the party, whenever he’d tried to sing to her, she’d been busy, singing along with someone else.

He tried to listen to the songs like he’d known her back then. He found that it hurt him, the idea that she had been alone.

He asked a friend of a friend to show him how to see what she was listening to online. She was listening to the song he’d listened to when, at sixteen, he was falling in love for the first time, trying to get out of it. Of course he hadn’t told her that. But he imagined her listening to it the same way, that she was falling in love for the first time.

He was listening to the song that was playing at the party when she was dancing. He was listening to the song that was playing at the party when she looked at him, when she looked at him and said I like this because he isn’t afraid to say what he means. He just laughed and then he went home.

She meant to say: why do you have to act this way? She meant to say: you’re so great like «You’re So Great» and what she meant to say, she imagined, was I love you, just like in the song. The words that came out weren’t her own. They were suddenly and only the words of a song.

She felt then that they interfered with the feeling, made it too apparent; she had to point them somewhere else, at someone else; like I like this because he isn’t afraid to say what he means, which was what she had meant to say about him, or about herself, though it wouldn’t have been true. Then he was gone, the version of him she’d imagined they’d shared: the versions of them that might have tuned in, listening to the same songs, hearing the same things. She didn’t need to say it. She imagined herself like a kind of shell, a sonic transparency, hollowed out and sent back in a set of estranged words – Our love is all we have – her feelings visible, audible, floating there just below the surface frequency.

She imagined he could have stayed, if that was how he really felt. It was a nice thing she’d heard once, and she needed to forget about it.

Though she couldn’t have heard.

He kept on listening to the song all the way home, over and over like «Over and Over», the one that says Our love is all we have, the one that means it.

Playlist

«Over and Over» by Fleetwood Mac

«My Life in Art» by Mojave 3

«Under the Bridge» by RHCP

«You’re So Great» by Blur

«Jesus, Etc.» by Wilco

«Sonic Worlding» is a monthly Norient column. It invites writers and artists from all over the world to to think and speculate with and not only about music. Where most music writing treats music as something that can be categorised and placed in pre-determined boxes (personality cults, end-of-year lists, genres, origins, styles), «Sonic Worlding» is interested in the vast potential of rhythms, ideas, and worlds that are still to be unlocked, attempting to spin new webs of thought spanning the globe. Edited & curated by Norient editor Philipp Rhensius.

Biography

Matilda Lin Berke is from Los Angeles. Now she lives in New York. Follow her on Instagram.

Published on July 25, 2024

Last updated on August 12, 2024

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The supposed first Black MIDI song, reuploaded to YouTube in 2014 as: «Death Waltz【ORIGINAL VIDEO】(Last Brutal Sister Flandre S)».

The Phenomenon of Black MIDI: An Introduction

Blog Post

by Stefan Schultze

In this blog post, you’ll discover the origins and evolution of Black MIDI,1 a Japanese subgenre that layers millions of notes to create complex auditory and visual compositions. You’ll read about its roots in Touhou Project, the progression of note density in remixes, and how this phenomenon challenges the limits of digital music technology.

Black MIDI is a Japanese subgenre and YouTube phenomenon that emerged in the anime and gaming scene around 2009, where so-called «blackers» remixed and created songs by layering a huge conglomeration of notes. This auditory influx is simultaneously visualized by hypnotizing patterns of interwoven, intersecting note clusters and scales. The density of the content created is both astounding and impossible to reproduce manually. In fact, it pushes the limits of what even technology can achieve.

The term Black MIDI stands for the technique of blackened musical notation, in which the standard notation increasingly resembles a black page by filling the staves with thousands or millions of notes. Thus, composers producing these blackened notations are called «blackers».

MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and is a protocol that allows computer software to communicate with synthesizers and other electronic instruments.

The Standard MIDI File (SMF) is a file format and medium to store music and provides a standardized way for music to be opened and edited in different systems. MIDI is normally produced on a grid in a sequencer within the digital piano roll with dashes and dots that can be transcribed to traditional notation and vice versa.

From Touhou Remixes to Unprecedented Note Counts

Within the gaming/anime scene, Touhou Project is a famous game development project led by the Japanese composer and video game developer Jun’ya Ōta aka ZUN. In this project, they were mostly developing vertical-scrolling 2D shooting games, more precisely bullet hell games or manic shooter games, which are a subgenre of shoot ‘em up video games. Even before Black MIDI, it was a thing to create crazy remixes of songs from Touhou games or Touhou-related songs.

«U.N Owen was her?» is a song composed by ZUN, the creator of the Touhou project for a video game released in 2002 called Touhou Project 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. In this game, the song is used for Flandre Scarlet, the Extra Stage Boss. As a result, the song’s name is often referred to as «Flandre’s theme». The song was remixed by a group called COOL&CREATE in 2004.

This was not yet Black MIDI, but a digital remix, still with various digital instruments. The first Black MIDI video was a remix of this remix and was uploaded by Kuro Yuki on the platform Niconico (originally Nico Nico Douga). From then on, it became a challenge within a small scene to share the MIDI files used for the creation and to create versions with an ever-increasing number of notes played.

The Evolution of Black MIDI

To better understand the origin and development of Black MIDI as a challenge within the gaming scene and Internet culture, I generated a video comparing the first Black MIDI upload to its original inspiration and to further versions with a higher note count of up to 12.7 million notes within the approximately 3:30 min of the song. There are more versions, so this is just a selection to show the development of density.

1. It’s important to distinguish that this article (and the entire Hyperplexia Special) focuses on the musical subgenre Black MIDI, not the band named Black MIDI.

Source Links

Repost of the first Black MIDI video: «Death Waltz【ORIGINAL VIDEO】(Last Brutal Sister Flandre S)» (YouTube)
Version by marc, total note count: 21,190, software: Synthesia (YouTube)
Version by thetrustedcomputer, total note count: 280,122, software: Synthesia (YouTube)
Version by thetrustedcomputer, total note count: 507,514, software: Synthesia (YouTube)
Version by thetrustedcomputer, total note count: 1,000,851, software: MIDI Trail (YouTube)
Version by thetrustedcomputer, total note count: 4,190,371, software: PianoFromAbove (YouTube)
Version by TheSuperMarioBros2, total note count: 12.9 million, software: Synthesia (YouTube)

This blog post is part of the Norient Online Special Hyperplexia, an expansion of the performance project of the same name by composer and pianist Stefan Schultze. The Special was funded by Bern Academy of the Arts HKB.

Biography

Stefan Schultze (*1979, Germany) is a composer and pianist and one of the most multifaceted and original musicians to come out of the German jazz scene. Schultze studied piano and composition in Cologne and New York. He occupies the interface between new music, improvisation, and jazz. His artistic projects cover a spectrum of compositions for small and large ensembles, from leading larger ensemble formations to initiating and producing projects on national and international stages. His compositions explore and translate music from a myriad of contexts, opening new sonic territories and transcending genres. Follow him on his website, Bandcamp, or Instagram.

Published on June 18, 2024

Last updated on June 24, 2024

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